On
the Fifth Day in the Drizzling Rain: Travel and Gender Performativity
in Bob Dylan's 'Isis'

Patrick Webster (University of Leeds)

Spring 2004

I’m very patriotic to the highway - Bob Dylan 1966

‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (1962), arguably one of
Bob Dylan’s most celebrated songs, began with the lines:

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man? (Dylan 1987, 53)

These lines have generally been perceived as referring to the Civil
Rights marches of the early 1960s; it was seen as a song asking
how many times a black man must walk down a road before he was called
a man. Thus it was a song, within the sphere of its own creation
and the tensions of its own time, very much concerned with issues
of race. This may arguably have been the specific inspiration for
Dylan’s song. However, from a wider perspective, reading these
lines forty years later, without historical bias, the song can be
read as having a different subtext. In a literal sense the lines
could now be read simply as a definition of masculinity within the
body of Dylan’s lyrical lexicon. The question the song now
appears to be asking is direct and unambiguou: to be called ‘a
man’ one is required to walk down a road, to walk down a road
a certain unspecified number of times. This is the literal definition
of masculinity within the opening lines of the song.

This interpretation may seem to have little significance were it
not for the fact that such a definition of masculinity would appear
to be a common trope within Dylan’s songs. It is one that
occurs consistently throughout all his work. If one looks, for example,
at one of Dylan’s earliest lyrics, ‘Song to Woody’
(1962), we find these lines:

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down. (Dylan 1987, 6)

Again one finds the idea of walking a road to define yourself as
a man. The narrator of the song goes on to compare himself to the
other men that have travelled the road and sees himself as following
in their footsteps. He strives to place himself, ‘on the road,’
with the great blues singers of the past:

Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too,
An’ to all the good people that travelled with you.
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men,
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I would maintain that there is, throughout the body of Dylan’s
work, a relentless urge to keep moving, an enduring notion of rambling,
of travelling, of wandering - and, most importantly, an enduring
notion that this is invariably seen as a wholly masculine endeavour.
[One could cite a number of early Dylan songs, all dealing explicitly
with the idea of masculine travel, for example: ‘Standing
on the Highway’ (1962), ‘Long Time Gone’ (1962),
‘Walkin’ Down the Line’ (1963), ‘Down the
Highway’ (1963), ‘Dusty Old Fairgrounds’ (1963)
and ‘Paths of Victory’ (1964).] This is a theme that
extends throughout the whole of Dylan’s career; for example,
the songs on Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (1997), begin, end,
and are concerned throughout, with men walking and men travelling.

I should perhaps note that to perceive of a notion of travel and
movement within Dylan’s lyrics, is, in itself, not original;
other critics of Dylan’s work have also pointed this out.
For example, David Pichaske commented that:

Early Dylan lyrics are permeated with the theme of departure, leaving,
clearing out and travelling on, escaping the inadequate present
(Grey 1987, 101)

However, the specific intent here is to link the theme directly
with the idea of a gendered identity. My argument here is that Dylan’s
work explicitly relates the concept of travel with the concept of
being a man and hence to the performative construct of a gendered
identity.

One might think, for example, of the blues tradition, a tradition
which Dylan has always been closely associated with, a tradition
in which masculine travel has always been a dominant motif. Aside
from this, there is the obvious idea that men travel in order to
look for work, and one could cite the influence of Woody Guthrie
at this point. In Guthrie’s work it is certainly true that
economic factors led men to take to the road in search of employment.
A number of Guthrie’s songs, for example ‘Tom Joad’
portrayed the plight of men in such situations. However, I would
argue that Dylan’s idolisation of Guthrie was connected more
with the mythological and romantic notions in Guthrie’s life
and work. Guthrie’s famous book, Bound for Glory
(which greatly influenced Dylan early in his career) celebrated
the theme of the outcast, the drifter, the man fleeing from convention
and conformity, the hobo who found freedom on the highways and railroads
of the American landscape. In a sense Guthrie (or the persona he
created) was an outlaw, albeit a morally sanctioned outlaw. Guthrie
tapped into the moral relevance of the outlaw in American culture,
an idea that would be repeatedly displayed within Dylan’s
work as well.

I would argue that the road for the men in Dylan’s work is
primarily a place with a romantic, visionary and mythological ambition.
Furthermore, the men most admired in Dylan’s work are often
outlaws and outsiders - men who have moved beyond the constructed
confines of society apparent in these songs. ‘I might look
like Robert Ford,’ Dylan sang in ‘Outlaw Blues,’
(1965) ‘But I feel just like Jesse James’ (Dylan 1987,
167).

Aside from Woody Guthrie, another obvious influence here were the
Beat writers, and most specifically Jack Kerouac. Kerouac’s
seminal work, On the Road, obviously informs a similar
pattern of male desire found within Dylan’s work, propounding
a significantly gender-specific quest for self-discovery, via the
road. Hence Kerouac’s work offers the idea of a male outsider
escaping narrow-hearted consumerism in search of the lost frontier,
making a celebratory escape from responsibility; and, in so doing,
exerting a large influence in Dylan’s positioning romance
and visionary experience on the road. In the reverentially titled
‘On the Road Again’ (1965), Dylan’s male narrator
wants to be on the road, wants to be in the wide open spaces, wants
to be in the wilderness, wants, in fact, to be anywhere as long
as he is not with the woman of the song - and the rest of her family:

Well, I woke up in the morning
There’s frogs inside my socks
Your mama, she’s a-hiding
Inside the icebox
Your daddy walks in wearing
A Napoleon Bonaparte mask
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, do you have to ask? (Dylan 1987, 168)

This is typical of a large number of songs Dylan wrote in the mid-1960s,
positioning a male character desperately attempting to avoid the
onset of familial constraints. Other examples include: ‘Motorpsycho
Nitemare’ (1964), ‘Maggie’s Farm’ (1965),
‘Tombstone Blues’ (1965) and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’
(1965). These songs portray men who don’t want to settle down
with the farmer’s daughter, who don’t want to work for
brother’s or pa’s or ma’s, men who want to get
away from Mama’s in the factory and Papa’s in the alley,
and men who want nothing to do with fifth daughters and first fathers
and seventh sons.

In one of Dylan’s seminal works of the 1960s, ‘It Ain’t
Me Babe’ (1964), a similar intent can be more explicitly inferred.
The famous refrain, with its thrice repeated denial of ‘No,
no, no, It ain’t me babe’ has been read as both a political
and a personal message. In the political sense the line can be read
as a retreat from a world of social protest, but, in a different
and more individual discourse, the line can be read simply as a
repudiation of confinement within a feminine domain. Thus the refrain
of the song, ‘It ain’t me babe, it ain’t me you’re
looking for ... ’ becomes a message from a man to a woman,
or even from men to women, a message repudiating the idea of any
kind of permanent commitment.

In a later song, ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’
(1981), Dylan again put forward the idea of a retreat away from
commitment, but here included a possible reason why:

Don’t know what I can say about Claudette,
That wouldn’t come back to haunt me.
Finally had to give her up,
About the time she began to want me ... (Dylan 1987, 464)

Here the male protagonist is compelled to give up the woman at
the very moment she expresses a desire for him; and there is a sense
that some part of the self must be kept inviolate from a feminine
sphere of influence. In an earlier song, ‘Don’t Think
Twice, It’s Alright’ (1963), the reason for the break-up
of the relationship is contiguous with this same concept:

I’m thinkin’ and a wonderin’ all the way down
the road,
I once loved a woman, a child I’m told.
I gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul,
But don’t think twice, it’s alright. (Dylan 1987, 61)

This is an idea that culminates in the song, ‘Sweetheart
Like You’ (1983):

You know, I once knew a woman who looked like you,
She wanted a whole man, not just a half,
She used to call me sweet daddy when I was only a child,
You kind of remind me of her when you laugh. (Dylan 1987, 474)

The male figure here will only offer half of himself, with the
implied suggestion that he must retain some part of himself outside
of the female domain. It would seem to me that the men in Dylan’s
songs repeatedly fail to live up to the expectations of the women
they find themselves in relationships with, an idea perhaps personified
by a line from ‘One More Night’ (1969):

I just could not be what she wanted me to be (Dylan 1987, 274)

It is significant that even in songs which would purport to describe
happily ensconced marital relationships, even in songs that have
generally been perceived as extolling the pleasures of existence
within a settled monogamous life with a wife and children, even
here there is still a sense of scepticism and doubt. For example,
in ‘Sign on the Window’ (1970), Dylan ended the song
with a vision of supposed domestic bliss:

Build me a cabin in Utah,
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout,
Have a bunch of kids who call me ‘Pa,’
That must be what it’s all about,
That must be what it’s all about (Dylan 1987, 293)

There is a sense here of a male voice striving to convince itself
of the concept it proposes. Whilst the idea of making sense of the
world by placing it within an arena of home, wife and children is
one obvious means of defining oneself as a man, there is nonetheless
an element of self-imposed coercion being utilised . We are told
that this ‘must be what it’s all about,’ and the
fact that Dylan feels the need to state this twice suggests he perhaps
protests too much. As Michael Gray suggested, the closure of the
song is ‘made less positive by its being repeated, as if for
self-reassurance’ (Gray 1972, 290).

There are a wide range of theories to account for the masculine
fear of engulfment in the female, and the subsequent loss of self.
For example, Julia Kristeva has explored the masculine fear of the
abject nature of the female, and Nancy Chodorow’s work has
identified how women’s universal responsibility for mothering
creates asymmetrical factors between the genders. However, it seems
to me, Dylan’s texts offer a simple and yet powerful means
of evading a sense of confronting the problematical discursive manoeuvres
in constructing a gendered identity. The concept of movement and
the freedom to travel becomes a means of evading this engulfment
within the feminine; and to keep moving, to refrain from stopping,
at least offers one way out of this dichotomy.

There are, it must be admitted, isolated examples of songs in which
Dylan places a male protagonist out in the wilderness in the company
of a woman. For example, in ‘John Wesley Harding’ (1968):

Twas down in Chaynee County
A time they talk about,
With his lady by his side
He took a stand ... (Dylan 1987, 249)

One might also think of the singer and his companion, Magdalena,
who travel together in ‘Romance in Durango’ (1976),
and also the sister who is on the highway with the steel driving
crew in ‘Tough Mama’ (1974). The one other major example
is ‘Gypsy Lou’ (1963), a song in which the gender roles
were completely reversed, a song about ‘a ramblin’ woman
with a ramblin’ mind’ who leaves a large number of masculine
lovers behind her. However, these are the exceptions that prove
the rule, the wilderness in Dylan’s work is predominantly
defined as the place where males, usually heroic males, retreat
to escape the domain of women.

In his book America in the Movies, Michael Wood speculated
on the motives behind the male heroes of Hollywood westerns in the
1940s and 1950s. This speculation may possibly illuminate the question
why so many male protagonists in Dylan’s work have an attraction
for the road and such an equivocal attitude toward women:

[T]he hero secretly fears women - women and the civilisation, compromise
and settled life they represent; he sees them as sources of corruption
and betrayal, luring him away from independence and a sure sense
of himself, as well as from the more comforting company of men (Wood
1975, 43).

It would seem to me that such fears and desires also operate in
Dylan’s work. One of the songs that most reflects this, is
‘Isis,’ from the 1976 release, Desire. This
was a song that explored ideas of freedom and escape, a song that
mixed the surreal and the allegorical, the mythic and the real,
in a sophisticated melange of gender politics - and a song I now
wish to consider in some detail here.

In taking Michael Wood’s argument above, I would suggest one
can read the song as dealing with ideas very much redolent of the
Western, albeit a Western genre Dylan revisit with a postmodern
sense of parody and irony. Whilst the Western has seldom been seen
as an important or typical theme within Dylan’s work - it
does, I would argue, deserve a certain degree of attention. One
might initially consider the first words Dylan gives the world,
or at least the first words found in Lyrics 1962-1987.
The opening lines to ‘Talkin’ New York’ (1961),
the first song in the collection, finds the narrator of the song:

Ramblin’ out of the wild west
Leavin’ the towns I loved the best
Thought I’d seen some ups and downs
‘Till I came into New York Town (Dylan 1987, 3)

Thus Dylan, in a certain sense, appears to the world coming out
of the wild west; in a sense he appears to the world as if he was
emerging from this genre. In addition to this Dylan has written
a significant range of songs set in total or in part within the
Western genre, for example: ‘John Wesley Harding’ (1968),
‘Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ (1975), ‘Romance
in Durango’ (1976), ‘New Danville Girl’ (1985),
the collection of songs from Dylan’s soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s
film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and a number of others. [These
include: ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie (1963), ‘The
Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest (1968), ‘Wanted Man’
(1969), ‘Patty’s Gone to Laredo’ (1975) ‘Senor:
Tales of Yankee Power’ (1978) and ‘The Man in the Long
Black Coat’ (1989)].

The Western as a genre might be dismissed as a lightweight and escapist
form of popular culture. However, as Jane Tompkins argues in her
book, West Of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, there
is nothing lightweight or escapist about the needs the Western answers,
‘the desires they arouse of the vision of life they portray’
(Tompkins 1992, 11). Tompkins argues that the Western provides an
environment in which men can find a reality that might otherwise
be lacking in their lives, that the Western functions as:

... a symbol of freedom, and of the opportunities for conquest.
It seems to offer escape from the conditions of life in modern industrial
society: from a mechanised existence, economic dead-ends, social
entanglements, unhappy personal relations, political injustice (Tompkins
1992, 4)

What is at stake is the sense of challenge, a method of getting
away from the triviality of life into something that at least seems
to be real. The hunger that Westerns satisfy is a hunger not so
much for adventure but for meaning. In a general sense the Western
is a genre in which something really is at stake. Thus the genre
is not an escape from reality but an attempt to get as close as
possible to something that represents reality. As Tompkins puts
it, ‘In the Western nothing stands between the man and the
world’ (Tompkins 1992, 220) and the use of the word ‘man’
in this quotation is relevant, insomuch as the Western was, and
is, almost universally about men.

In ‘Isis’ we find a man acting out the solitary nature
of the archetypal Wild Western hero, a hero who is self-reliant,
independent and, above all, free of female dependency. This is apparent
from the beginning of the narrative, wherein the hero marries an
exotic woman (whom, for reasons never clearly explained, has the
name of an Egyptian goddess), but then feels compelled to leave
her:

I married Isis on the fifth day of May,
But I could not hold on to her very long.
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away
For the wild and unknown country where I could not go wrong ...
(Dylan 1987, 378)

The song itself offers little in the way of an answer to the question:
why this man cannot stay with this woman, why he could not hold
on to her for very long. It merely expresses a need for the woman,
but also expresses a need for adventure and freedom, together with
the paradox of needing them both at the same time.

From his public comments it would seem that Dylan perceives the
song as having marriage at its core. In concert performances he
often prefaced the song by referring to it from this perspective:

Listen closely, this is a true story, it could happen to any man.
This is about the marriage ceremony between man and woman, it’s
what happens when you get married. It’s called ‘Isis.’
(The comment derives from a concert performance in Montreal on 4
December 1975 - a performance included in the film, Renaldo
and Clara.)

However, this would hardly seem to be the song’s actual intent,
if the song is about marriage it would seem to be about marriage
of a wholly different kind. Thus, far from being a song about a
conventional marriage, the song seems more concerned with what the
narrator of the song does after he has married the woman called
Isis, with what happens when he is absent from the company of women,
and what happens when he is in the company of other men. One might
recall here Leslie Fieldler’s phrase ‘the holy marriage
of males’ (Fieldler 1966, 344) as portrayed in American literature,
and this, I would suggest, is closer to the actual nature of marriage
within the song.

The first thing the narrator does after removing himself from Isis’s
feminine influence is to cut off his hair. A number of critics of
Dylan’s work have speculated over the meaning of this. To
Aidan Day it implied a loss of creative energy and a sense of purification;
(Day 1988, 38) similarly, Stephen Scobie saw it as undergoing a
ritual purification (Scobie 1991, 161). Wilfrid Mellers perceived
the removal of the hero’s hair as asserting a male dominance
before embarking on a heroic adventure (Mellers 1984, 189), whilst
to John Herdman the act was a shedding of complexity, a way of seeking
simplicity (Herdman 1982, 74). All these readings would seem valid,
there is certainly a ritualistic element to the act; and it would
seem fair to say Dylan’s hero cuts off his hair to prepare
himself for the ordeal ahead. However, I would see the act as ultimately
pointing to a masculine stereotype, since it is culturally the norm
for men to have shorter hair than women. The cutting of one’s
hair, and especially shaving, demonstrates a control over one of
the main visible masculine indicators of maturing sexuality; shaving
is an initiation into manhood. Thus, in a sense, the act can ultimately
be seen as emphasising gender identity.

The narrator may have decided to leave the heterosexual embrace
of a newly married wife, but - like the act of cutting off one’s
hair - the song seems to have a continual anxiety to hold to the
dominant ideology of a ‘normal’ heterosexual identity.
As the first verse tells us, the narrator rides straight away, and
whilst he may be heading for a wild unknown country (arguably the
wild and unknown country of his sexuality) there is still the insistence
that he cannot go wrong. In other words, one reading of the song
suggests the hero is determined he will not stray from a rigidly
defined heterosexual structure, an idea emphasised in the second
verse:

I came to a high place of darkness and light.
The dividing line ran through the centre of town.
I hitched up my pony to a post on the right,
Went into the laundry to wash my clothes down ...

There are oppositions apparent here: darkness and light, high and
low places, right and left, or perhaps even right and wrong. However,
what seems crucial is the fact that the hero chooses the right hand
option; in other words, he is insistent on following the rational,
dominant and conventional ideological route. Furthermore, the narrator
goes into a laundry to wash his clothes down; this, like the cutting
off of his hair, could be seen as a way of suggesting cleanliness
and righteousness; in other words, the opposite to any kind of transgression.
However, in the laundry an encounter occurs which greatly augments
the narrative:

A man in the corner approached me for a match.
I knew right away he was not ordinary.
He said, ‘Are you lookin’ for somethin’ easy to
catch?’
I said, ‘I got no money.’ He said, ‘That ain’t
necessary.’

The nature of the meeting is redolent with ambiguity, the words
‘match’ and ‘catch’ both seem to possess
dual connotations. On a literal level the word ‘match’
suggests the stranger may merely want to light a cigarette, but
on another level it could be seen as a proposal to enter into a
relationship of a reciprocal kind. In a similar way, the word ‘catch’
resonates with an equivocal intent. In one sense it is an economic
invitation to make a quick profit, but the word also resonates forward
in time to a line in verse eight: ‘When he died I was hopin’
that it wasn’t contagious...’ Whilst the song was written
in a pre-Aids universe of 1975, it nonetheless retains a subversive
quality. There is still a sense of infraction in the words ‘contagious’
and ‘catch,’ of some kind of unknown exchange having
taken place, an exchange that has implications for both of the men
concerned. What we can be certain of is a feeling of tension within
the relationship between the two men; these men are not ‘two
drifters off to see the world.’

Jane Tompkins’ description of the repressed, covert sexuality
between men in Westerns might be seen as applicable here:

... the hero frequently forms a bond with another man - sometimes
his rival, more often his comrade - a bond that is more important
than any relationship he has with a woman and is frequently tinged
with homo-eroticism (Tompkins 1992, 39)

In verse four the two men begin their journey:

We set out that night for the cold in the North.
I gave him my blanket, he gave me his word.
I said, ‘Where are we goin’?’ He said we’d
be back by the fourth.
I said, ‘That’s the best news that I’ve ever heard.’

One notes that the two men leave at night, that they head for the
cold and the north; these being harsh, masculine images that stand
in opposition to Isis’s feminine southern world of lightness
and warmth. There is a sense that these are men braving the elements,
undergoing ordeals that exact superhuman effort. As in the Western,
what is at stake here is a getting away from the triviality of life
into something that seems real, something that calls ‘the
whole soul of man into being,’ into a sense of action that
‘totally saturates the present moment,’ that totally
absorbs the body and mind, and directs one’s life to ‘the
service of an unquestionable goal’ (Tompkins 1992, 12). The
goal of the two men in ‘Isis’ would appear to be a search
for treasure, but, within the discourse of the adopted Western genre,
the goal could be interpreted as having a greater significance.
To borrow from Tompkins, the two men are in:

... a world without God, without ideas, without institutions, without
what is commonly recognised as culture, a world of men and things,
where male adults in the prime of life find ultimate meaning in
doing their best together on the job (Tompkins 1992, 37)

Further to this, the sense of bonding between the two men, as they
look for an ultimate meaning together, is enhanced by the exchange
of possessions, quoted above, in verse four. The narrator gives
the stranger his blanket and receives, in return, the man’s
word. The gift of a blanket suggests a certain sense of intimacy,
what might be seen as almost a feminising gift indicating comfort
and warmth. Whilst the gift of ‘his word’ offers a further
element of ambiguity. In a sense the song could be read as a tract
concerning the male ownership of language. One man giving another
man ‘his word’ could be read not merely in the sense
of swearing a promise but also describing the ownership of language
itself. Allen Ginsberg may have described Isis as a ‘Lady
Language Creator’ (Talking about the song in his untitled
liner notes to Desire, Ginsberg spoke of: ‘To Isis,
Moon Lady Language Creator Birth Goddess, Mother of Ra, Saraswati
& Kali-Matoo, Hecate, Ea, Astarte, Sophia & Aphrodite, Divine
Mother’). However, the discourse of the song - and our theoretical
construct of language - betrays this idea. Isis, as a woman, does
not own language, her gender lacks the universal signifier and thus
her words are relatively unimportant and are easily forgotten, whereas
the male gift of ‘the word’ is of significance. In a
symbolic and a literal sense both men possess the phallus, Lacan’s
universal arbiter of sexuality, the key signifier of meaning, the
ultimately privileged signifier. Thus there is a sense here in which
men own language, they give each other their word, and use language
to control women. (One could perceive of an unintentional lampoon
here. In the light of a Lacanian reading relating to the gift of
the word, the narrative subplot in the song of heading north becomes
clearer and brings to mind the idea of masculine adventurers undertaking
polar journeys. Thus the idea of polar expeditions, replete with
the now almost risible search for ‘the pole,’ overlaid
with Lacanian resonances of the phallus as the ultimate signifier,
at least offers a further layer of interpretative thought.)

In the fifth verse a materialist motive for the journey is suggested:

I was thinkin about turquoise, I was thinkin’ about gold,
I was thinkin’ about diamonds and the world’s biggest
necklace.
As we rode through the canyons, through the devilish cold,
I was thinkin’ about Isis, how she thought I was so reckless.

As indicated previously, there is an implication that a quest for
treasure, for fabulous wealth, may be the real purpose of the journey,
putting the song within a common genre of adventure story. However,
material greed is an incidental incentive, far from a prospect of
gold and diamonds, it is the idea that Isis will find the narrator
‘so reckless’ that is of primary importance (Williams
1992, 67). Once again a contradiction is inferred, the male narrator
may have achieved his wish of finding himself within an exclusively
masculine environment, but nonetheless his thoughts are still concerned
with the female presence he has left behind.

The two men continue their journey and eventually reach the pyramids,
which are, somewhat implausibly it must be said, buried in ice.
It is at this point that the narrator’s companion reveals
that it is a body he is really looking for. There is an ambiguity
and a tension to the line, ‘Twas then that I knew what he
had on his mind’. However, as to what the man may have actually
had on his mind is left unspoken. In a conspicuous gap in the narrative,
an elision, an aporia, the stranger dies and the narrator quickly
buries him. At this stage the narrative becomes overtly compressed
and the cause of the man’s demise is not disclosed. All we
can discern is an anxious concern on behalf of the narrator with
the cause of the fatality, and a hope that it is not communicable.

The narrator then returns to Isis, to tell her he loves her, which
is not quite the same, one notes, as actually loving her. Isis is
in the meadow where the creek used to rise. There is further subtle
phrasing here, the phrase ‘where the creek used to rise’
might be seen as suggesting a lost fertility, pointing to a number
of possible readings. However, the song is also rooted in a narrative
of Egyptian myth, and, if only on a much reduced level, the dry
creek evokes the dried-up Nile of the original Isis-Osiris story.
(This connection to ancient Egyptian mythology has been discussed
by a number of other Dylan commentators; for example, see Scobie,
page 161.) In the original myth it was a failure of fertility that
called for a sacrificial death and rebirth. Seth, the son of Isis
and Osiris, killed his father and scattered him in fourteen pieces
up and down the Nile. Isis searched until she had found thirteen
of the pieces to rebuild her husband, lacking only the fourteenth
piece, the phallus. It is thus interesting to note that when the
narrator breaks into the tomb he finds the casket empty: ‘There
were no jewels, no nothing ... ’ The word nothing could be
read in Shakespearian terms as ‘no thing,’ in other
words no phallus. In a sense the song becomes a search for the phallus.
There is no thing, there is an empty tomb, and there is a dried
up creek. Dylan’s technique here is to use a complex overlay
of different myths, to suggest a sense of sexual aridity present
just beneath the surface of the lyric.

In the penultimate verse of the song the narrator and Isis have
a short, surreal conversation in which the narrator, somewhat unconvincingly
it must be said, agrees he will stay and seal his commitment to
Isis:

She said, ‘Where ya been?’ I said, ‘No place
special.’
She said, ‘You look different.’ I said, ‘Well,
I guess.’
She said, ‘You been gone.’ I said, ’It’s
only natural.’
She said, ‘You gonna stay?’ I said, ‘If you want
me to, yes.’

The narrator’s final quoted word of the lyric is a life-affirming,
Joycean statement: ‘Yes,’ (‘yes’ being the
last word of Ulysses), which offers the song a further
intertextual resonance. The narrator of the song, like Leopold Bloom,
has returned to his beginning, and, after a period of wandering,
has found no answer, no solution, no meaning with which to confront
the sense of futility, frustration and loneliness he had had before
he left. Furthermore, Isis, like Molly Bloom, has remained at home
waiting for the man to return, as she knew he would. Both Dylan’s
unnamed narrator and Leopold Bloom are, in a sense, subjugated by
the women they are involved with. There is a sense that both Isis
and Molly Bloom have a greater understanding of mens’ fears
and desires and that, as women, they know how to use this knowledge.
Isis’s lover and Bloom may possess the universal male signifier,
they may travel in the world as women cannot, but for all of this
they ultimately seem dependent on the female presence and are continually
drawn back to them.

Thus the song could be read as an allegorical construct encircling
the impossibility of ever reconciling gender differences, the impossibility
of man and woman ever fully comprehending one another. The question
the song appears to ask is whether Isis, and her reckless, masculine
lover, can ever live happily ever after, or indeed, can any man
and woman ever truly live happily ever after? The song derives from
an album called Desire, and there would seem to be a desire to achieve
a union between the masculine and feminine universes. But whether
this can ever be achieved within the performative construct of gender
in this song, and many others in Dylan’s canon, remains uncertain.

In the thirteenth and final verse we get this summing up:

Isis, oh, Isis, you mystical child.
What drives me to you is what drives me insane.
I still can remember the way that you smiled,
On the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain.

The narrator, forced back into a feminine domain, recalls the contradiction
of needing Isis and not needing her, and of risking his life and
possibly his sanity in the process of doing this. Thus the song
ends, in a completely circular fashion, on the fifth day of May
in the drizzling rain.

‘Isis,’ like other American texts as diverse as: Moby
Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and On
the Road, finds a male couple undertaking a quest narrative.
One might, for example, compare the two men in ‘Isis’
to Ahab and Ishmael. The narrator might be seen as an equivalent
Ishmael, ensconced in both the feminine and masculine worlds, whilst
the man the narrator encounters could be seen as representing Ahab,
a figure with a one-sided definition of his masculinity, as his
tragically fixed purpose and fixated personality attest. Leslie
Fieldler has written that Moby Dick can be read not only
as an account of a whale-hunt, but also as ‘a love story,
perhaps the greatest love story in our fiction’ (Fieldler
1966, 344). In an analogous sense ‘Isis’ becomes more
than a mere account of a search for the world’s biggest necklace;
in its own way it is also a love story. In both texts, in greater
and lesser ways, one can perceive an exploration of Fieldlerian
ideas of manly friendships acting as a substitute for marriage.
It is important that this is deniable, but it is a theme that nonetheless
runs throughout Moby Dick and, I would argue, throughout
‘Isis,’ a song I consider as one of Bob Dylan’s
most significant textual creations.